A Long Time to Go and Very Far Away

This really is quite sad... Ever since (the crashing disappointment of) ep.3, I've been hanging on to the promise of Star Wars TV series and so...

At least when TV is crap it's generally not something to self-harm over, yeah? Having said this, the most unalloyed pleasure I've taken in anything from a galaxy far, far away, in recent years was in the viewing of the Clone Wars cartoon series, especially series three which actually engaged with moving the story forward in a more serious manner than the others. The plotting was tight, the action - in an expressionistic manner - was as good as the real-thing, and the acting was better than ...you know... the Jar-Jar and Anikin show. I honestly believe much of this resulted from the lack of interference by Mr. Lucas who, it is now clear, just doesn't know what he's doing outside of the special effects department; but I'm dwelling tactlessly on matters which were decided long ago in the court of popular opinion so let's move on.
The animated series were helmed by Genndy Tartakovsky whose recent bio is full of potentially very exciting stuff (including a new Dark Crystal movie!!) and it is safe to say he has established a level of trust vis-a-vis quality-assurance of his work. The forthcoming clone-wars animated series has names attached to it that only inspire horrid, sweaty, fear. Either they have little track-record (and what there is suggests only technical expertise) or, as in the case of the writers, stuff from the very darkest pits of Disney's Sunday excressences.
The live action series destined for '09 has still only got George's face stuck like a big shiny ticker sticker on the plastic box: WARNING: Contents May Offend! Actually Rick McCallum is producing, and Lucas is only EP, but, still...
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Chewie! Blast 'em!

PS According to the Australian, blogging is going the way of the covered wagon. at peak popularity - last October - 100,000 blogs were created every day and not only has this levelled off, but more and more fall into disuse with each passing second. Of course we all know the intar-web is a lonely place, littered with websites and blogs that will never again be updated - something I find poignantly distressing every time I encounter it, for some reason - in addition to the ones which are full of scary spam and - I presume - viruses. What I hadn't thought of is that, if you've attached some personal identifier to said virtual fragment, the web will forever point back to your fallen, virtual aspirations whenever someone googles your good self. What does that say about you? For me it adds a kind of paranoid hysteria to the guilt I already experience when I think about how long it has been since I last updated my blog...that I'm pretty sure almost no-one reads anyway. From this I can only conclude that ... I am a nutter, thank- you, graciously, for your time.

PPS Has anyone noticed that the Federal Government can't seem to remember how to wear pants anymore, never mind run government? Well I always thought the latter, but John Howard had Janette to dress him...maybe she was only on loan from Satan? Look, this is all a long-winded way of saying that they're falling to bits and it is a huge anti-climax after so many years of eeeviiil. I just don't get where they went wrong - I mean its not as if they started doing things very differently: arrogant - check, conservative as all-get-out on any issue you care to mention - check, smooching US behind - check. I don't get it.

Yet I won't say that I'm not enjoying it.

Recently there was a delightful piece in the SMH fairly ripping into Santo Santoro: reminding us how morally uncompromising he'd been when attacking the ABC, oh the delicious irony and so forth; and today I happened to be listening to Radio National where let's face it, Joe Hockey would have a right to feel like he's facing enemy fire but when Julia Gillard marched upon him like an implacable army hell-bent on avenging those fallen to the wicked IR laws he must have felt like he was the first-up-against-the-wall in the throes of the revolution. Not that I believe mincing, dissembling, colourless Australian Labor will fulfill my epic Tolstoyan fantasies any time soon, but listen to the podcast, it warmed my blood.

Clouds on the Horizon

I have some spare time, I'm in an internet cafe, my email is virtually up to date. I hadn't checked on the progress of my favourite lost-in-development game, done that... why don't I blog it. I'd say more, but the Wikilink will tell u everything u need to know anyway: a new (canonical) game for the Fallout series based on Bethesda's Gamebryo engine (of Oblivion fame) - so, no more third-person isometric view then, I don't know if I'm as sad as some people about that - will be released on PC, XBOX360 & PS3, previews later this year. Hoorah! So long as Jack Thompson doesn't claim Bethesda is harvesting children's gall-bladders (mmm...that tangy bile flavour), we should have a game sometime in the next year or two.

(I Am) A Trifle Upsetting

Oh lookit - its the delightful little fellow Mr. F*cknbugger, he's all jumping up and down and excited about something! Maybe its because he missed the Andrew Bird show. I remember sitting down to tea with him and little Miss Halfnass and we read the local music newspaper which said Andrew was coming to town, but we ignored it because we forgot to connect Andrew's name with someone we really liked. How frightfully VEXING!

Lol and DIE!

Hi there - u too can have skin like this! ...and a giant bat...


...and horrible kids jamming the chat channels with their opinions on what is, variously, gay, today.
Actually the ones in the screenshot (lower left corner) are quite civilised and focused on the topic of the channel in which they appear. This is not as common as I would like it to be. - Sigh - this is what u get when u start playing WoW as an old person.
I've been doing it a bit, so I thought I might post about it, although I think 'teh n0velty' of blogging about warcraft is minimal.
I have found it confronting, simply because it is the largest game i've ever played. Never having MMORPG'd before this (i play games to escape people usually - more on that later) i find it strange that gaming writers (gouts of laughter ensue) still manage to talk about games like Morrowind and Oblivion as large. Still it's more than just physical space, the scale of character-building (and isn't that term quite ironic in a gaming context) is just enormous - i suppose it would have to be to keep people coming back and paying their subscription fees. For me, and I'm unusual among even gamers I guess, my way of getting the monkey of gaming off my back (and any serious gamer knows the burden of time taken by gaming) is to get through a game as quickly as possible - then I can leave it behind and experience a period of satiation, free of the desire to game. In any other game going lvl 1-60 (now 1-70) is no probs (relatively), even in RPGs where time spent reaches to weeks rather than days. WoW is, then, to me, like a tar pit that I tried to swim across as fast as possible.

...

I need to get a screenshot of my character drowning in tar. I haven't found any tar pits yet...but I'm quite sure I will find some. If you know that old philosophers tract about anything in a universe of infinite possibility eventually appearing - they used it to try and prove the existence of god. All it proves in reality is that WoW is slowly drowning me.

A fantastic way I've found in the past to justify the serious wastage of massive amounts of time, is to turn the said time into 'participant observation'. This is probably going to come back and haunt me when my life's work is accused of being dumbed down 'leisure studies'. [Cartman voice please]: SCREW YOU GUYS! I think a political / post-colonial study of the most populous MMORPG in the world would be interesting. I was suckered into this thinking when - and i have to get some screenshots of this and also deploy a Wild West allegory - I was recruited as a sell-sword to go to the Barrens (read Wild West) by the local Orcs who don't admit they are a colonial force (but if you know the Warcraft back-story, that is exactly what they are) and there I slaughtered Zhevra (read Buffalo) for their HOOVES and threw the rest of the carcass AWAY. Then I incited a fight with the INDIGENOUS centaurs (Native Americans, anyone), who had been attacking the colonists for no reason (cough) by murdering the weaker ones till their warlike chief showed up, whereupon i assassinated him with my superior weapons.
Not all the game is like that, but most of it is susceptible to interesting political readings, and y'know, I like the game but I'm tempted to start talking all Jack frick'n Thompson about 6 million susceptible minds and crap. That's bollocks, i'm not saying slaughtering polygonal beasts leads to slaughtering school kids, i'm much more interested in more subtle political hegemony, that sort of thing. Just interesting at this stage. More at some later time.

Oh, if i weren't such a noob, I'd start, at the very least a guild, and quite possibly a CRUSADE against......LOL! I hate that term, it is used till it is almost completely lacking in meaning but yet it maintains a recursive undercurrent of derision - ugh. That would make an interesting linguistic study, a field about which I know next to nothing. It'd just make me angry anyway.

Peace out.

The Empire of Julia Gillard

I been thinking that I wanted to update my blog, y'know, once a year. I have also been thinking of doing something sensible that might actually keep me coming back to it like turning it into a research blog. For those of you who are interested - and blogspot seems generally devoid of people at all; this used to be a good virtual neighbourhood, now I go out my url and I see a spam blog selling penis enlargements, not cool! - anyway, assuming anyone actually ever visits my blog ever again, I am doing a PhD (sorta in cultural studies, so don't worry it's theory lite) on music programming in community radio. The crux of it is that commercial music producers and radio get a free ride from community broadcasters, the latter doing the hard yards of finding new 'product' and playing the crap out of it, essentially road testing it, and then the commercials can cherry pick the stuff they think will work, or otherwise use community radio as a niche marketing service. My argument is that money should be given to the community broadcasters for said service, either by commercial interests or, more likely, by government. When I want to compose my thoughts and avoid doing real work I'll post stuff here. In the mean time, something completely irrelevant that is a touch friendlier to tasteful consideration than the cultural carpet bombing that has been the Buffy the Musical poster adorning the prow of my blog for the past year -
- a new David Lynch film! Inland Empire opens here in Oz on the 26th of April, which is a day before my 30th birthday. Coincidence? I think not. Justin Theroux and Laura Dern reckon they have no idea what the film is actually about and Justin reckons Lynch has no idea either, so it might as well be ALL. ABOUT. ME. Chee-uckle.

PS In a non-gay way Justin Theroux is awesome, he was so good in Mullholland Drive. Also Rachel Griffiths should'a treated him better in Six Feet Under.

PPS Is anyone else excited about the long delayed but actually official release of Twin Peaks Season Two on DVD?

PPPS Don't you think that if Federal Labor has any chance of winning the next election there should be some faked Julia Gillard porn by now?(?!?!) That would certainly be evidence of the ground swell of interest I think we've all been looking for. As an amateur (tho completely disinterested) pollster I find this deeply concerning.

Once More With (That Cringing) Feeling

Now that I'm genuinely avoiding real work I feel like a blog. I've been thinking of using this as a research diary, but first I should like to post something here for posterity - since I can't find a hard copy of this, at least not at all easily, I am here posting a shining symbol of my surrender to cult-nerdiness:
A lot of people have lost respect for me over this issue...and the TV issue generally; my secret shame

Webcomics Will Make It Better

I'm sure I don't really need to put this here, but then, why not.
Here is a list of webcomics that I have been digging. Just so that I can remember them, & if anyone else were to look here, well they could dig them too.
This one I just found is called normallife.
This one is called vg cats. Which I don't always find funny, but when it's funny it is very funny. Check this next one out. Everybody knows about Penny arcade, right? Well I've posted enough of their comics on this site. I'm not going to post anymore, it feels like stealing, & also like I had nothing to say for myself.
I found this kewl, steam-punky serial called Alpha-shade.
There are tons more, but those are the ones that have most piqued my interest, lately. Oh, I will give Megatokyo a mention, even though they seem to have been running the same story, with no real development for several years on end.